


The Door in the Dark

by The_Carnivorous_Muffin



Category: Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Drama, Friendship, Gen, References to Depression
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-04
Updated: 2018-08-08
Packaged: 2019-06-21 20:30:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15565830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Carnivorous_Muffin/pseuds/The_Carnivorous_Muffin
Summary: Bella Swan studies abroad in Volterra Italy and meets her destiny while pondering the history of a man who never existed and a life that seems to have no real purpose.





	1. Chapter 1

Her number has always been up.

* * *

It was the fall of her junior year in college, she had decided to study abroad and get a taste of the world before she entered that hazy period of adulthood. Charlie had asked why she had chosen Volterra, a city he had never heard of, when Rome or Florence would have made much more sense for an art history major. She had said that Volterra had a rich history of art patronage, not quite as daunting as the Medici family, but impressive none the less. She would visit Rome and Florence as well as other cities while she was there, but everyone studied Michael Angelo, so why not do something different?

She supposed that speech made her sound independent, somewhat adventurous even, and perhaps even a little pretentious. That was alright, it was a complete lie anyway.

Something in the name, the way it tripped off her lips, called to her. A half remembered word in a conversation too banal to remember. A detail that should have been flagged but only now appeared highlighted in her mind. It breathed shadows, its heart a thing of darkness, and Bella could only stare at it as it whispered back at her. Volterra.

She had to go.

* * *

By that point in time she did not own any pictures of Edward. He had discarded them all and when she managed to regain her presence of mind she did not think to replace them. It will be as if I never existed, he had said.

If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it what sound does it make, Edward?

For a year she had held the echoes of that felled tree in her heart, holding onto it in desperation that without fallible memory it would cease to exist. That it would seep into a sort of questioning madness, a secret secret, that the world was filled with vampires only not because they were no longer there to reassure her of their presence.

At first she had thought it was love sickness, a death of all her hopes and dreams for the future, but as time wore on she realized it was something else entirely. She later told Jacob that it wasn’t so much that Edward had left as it was that she had been left. She’d been left in the wolves’ den, so to speak, because he had gotten bored of humoring her. The dangers of the world wouldn’t stop just because he went away, and he had known that, so by leaving her he was condemning her to die. He had left her to die in her own questioning madness and hadn’t bothered to look back.

It was him, after all, who had agreed and said her number was up. Somewhere, in the distance, Death was sharpening his scythe.

She thought about him occasionally now, wondering where he might have found himself, if some new high school girl was finding herself dazzled by glamours and illusions. But because she had no photos to pack she did not take him with her to that city in Italy, it ended up being for the best anyway.

* * *

She didn’t really believe things in her life had purpose. There was no grand meaning behind the sequence of events that had brought her to Volterra. Even the ones that, at the time, had seemed so monumental as to shake the foundations of her reality held no true bearing on the course of her life.

She loved the city as she hoped she would. She loved the language, sounding like a stuttering idiot but trying all the same, and knew that she had managed to find something worthy of holding in her memories. It didn’t need to connect with her past or with her future, Volterra could be a moment in itself, she could simply be a student here and that was all that mattered.

For a while this seemed true.

She went to class, explored the city, and did all the things she expected of herself.

There were no repetitive themes until Anthony came along.

* * *

All potential love interests in some way reminded her of Edward.

She supposed it was one of his few final blessings in that woods, that she would forever superimpose his image onto other men and see where the differences stood out best. She’d look at their eyes first, naturally not the same color, but instead would watch for the devotion in them that spark of divine light that spoke of epiphanies and unbridled joy. Edward had always been a bit expressive.

Edward had looked at her the way a religious man might look at God.

It was unfair to everyone. She couldn’t help but find their eyes a little dull, a little lacking, in comparison but she didn’t want to be worshipped, shouldn’t expect it even, yet somehow she did.

Even Jacob, who she knew had liked her more than anyone in the world, had seemed so pale in comparison to Edward’s brilliance; to his inhuman desperation where he clung so tightly to life and humanity which he had hoped he found in her. She had hated disappointing him, hated having to say no, not knowing whether it was because she wanted to or because of memories of things that weren’t even real.

She was damaged goods now, in more ways than one.

After Edward she had never tried to look for a boyfriend but looking back that wasn’t so different from before Edward either, the only difference now was that she had once had an interval where she had dated, if briefly, and knew there was something worth having. She was just too tired for it though even if they didn’t secretly desire to kill her she was too tired to deal with any of it.

Anthony was persistent though.

Without a prior friendship holding him back as in Jacob’s case he pushed forward regardless of any protests Bella might have. Bella wasn’t above flattery in the end and besides it was casual.

They went out for coffee, watched Italian films, walked through the square together. He was fun, he was normal, he was human, and there were no expectations.

Maybe, Bella thought, I’ll see him again once we get home. We’ll keep in touch via Skype, share stories about college, and maybe one day he’d hear an edited version of stories from high school. Edited was the most she could give these days but so few heard any of the stories at all.

* * *

A few months into their relationship and her stay in Italy she asked him if he believed in demons. Anthony was a Catholic, had grown up going to church, crossing himself, and knowing exactly when to kneel and stand in a church.

Watching him carefully even as she leaned against him on the worn couch of his leased apartment she listened as he laughed and said, “No, not really, why you?”

She knew in that moment that she had lost him and that she had been hoping she wouldn’t. It wasn’t the torrent of despair that had hit in a forest in the middle of Forks but there was a distinct pain where her heart would have been had it not been eaten out of her years ago. This is what comes of clinging, she said to herself.

She smiled slightly, a strained gesture, and shook her head saying only sometimes. It wasn’t enough of a lie that he could tell the difference.

* * *

In spite of everything Bella Swan was a hopeless romantic, perhaps even more so than Edward himself, because every time it happened she truly believed as if these stages in her life belonged only to themselves.

Events lead up to Edward, events lead up to Anthony, these were the pillars of her existence.

She was wrong, death was her constant, and nothing else would ever be.

It was a celebration for some saint whose name Bella couldn’t remember, they had gone to the square by the fountain and the clock tower, mingling among the crowds and stalls of food with cheerful smiles. Anthony dragged her along helping her to inspect this and that, asking her opinion, on the buildings and for the history of each. She’d smile and indulge him, spitting out small facts he might find interesting.

(It’s said that Saint Marcus drove out the vampires, you know…)

The clock struck high noon and they turned and saw an angel of massacre, a walking marble statue, with hair the color of autumn leading a parade of hapless worshippers behind her with a smile.

Why meet Edward all those years ago? Why face James and a camera in a darkened dance hall?

She froze almost unconsciously her face become an empty pale mask, Oh, she thought to herself, Oh….

She grabbed Anthony’s hand making to turn him away toward anything other than the woman who was anything but a woman, perhaps to a vendor, so that she could take him and get out and keep her head down for as long as it was necessary.

Fate had never exactly been her friend though.

* * *

A conversation.

“A tour sounds like fun, I hear it’s really hard to get into the building without one.”

“I’m just not feeling all that up to it, Anthony, I think I’m getting heat exhaustion or something. We should head back.”

“Come on, Bella, when will we ever get this chance again?”

“I really don’t think we should go, she has so many people in the tour already, we’ll just crowd things up.”

“It’s a tour, not a tutoring session, it’s not going to be that much larger with us. Come on.”

“Anthony, you don’t understand, we can’t go.”

“Why not?”

“We can’t.”

“… Look if you feel that way I’ll just meet you sometime later, okay.”

“… Come with me, please.”

“Not when you’re being like this, Jesus, and I remember you said you didn’t like scenes.”

* * *

Her final response was somewhat hard to remember as it was unimportant and ineffective.

Perhaps she told him that if he left they were finished, throwing him to the curb with little to no explanation in the eyes of a now too curious vampire.

Perhaps she begged him not to go, almost silently, tears leaking at the corners of her eyes.

Or perhaps she just stood there, a resigned and watched as he left her with a somewhat wounded expression on his face so certain that he would see her tomorrow and understand then.

Whatever her response it didn’t work because within a moment she was standing alone in a crowded square with certain knowledge that she would never see Anthony again.

* * *

She burned photographs in memory of Edward; it was as if Anthony never existed in the first place.

In their place she drew a portrait of death sharpening his scythe.

* * *

There were several odd details about her time with the Cullens that escaped only to return at inopportune moments. She still didn’t enjoy thinking of them, a stabbing sensation in her chest often accompanied even the mention of their names, but like a broken record some images seemed caught.

She couldn’t for the life of her remember Edward’s favorite color but she knew that to him death smelled like jasmine. It was only in a dull class one day in a lecture hall looking at slides of ancient artwork that she remembered Carlisle had once been a priest.

It wasn’t until Anthony had been lured away by the Pied Piper of Volterra, dancing a jaunty tune in the costume of a red-light worker, that she remembered a conversation about Volterra and the beings who lived there.

In the Library flipping through books of collected art she finally found it, not the portrait hanging in the Cullen’s living room, but a similar one. Only three men were featured in this one and despite the softness of oil on their features and the dulled fervor in their eyes she knew them for what they were without bothering to guess.

The Volturi coven, unnamed rulers of the city of vampires, creating a human sanctuary within their walls but only if the human didn’t dare venture further into the labyrinth.

As was typical of her Bella Swan had walked into the eye of the hurricane without even being aware that she had passed through the storm.

* * *

A quality of hers that had gone unsung by Edward in his moments of inspired worship was her formidable stubbornness.

She did not expect to see the vampires again in spite of living in the city with them. After remembering the conversation with Edward, one of her last as it turned out, she reviewed what she knew. True, it was the Volturi who removed those humans who knew too much, but she was hardly shouting their secret from the rooftops.

Bella Swan was a quiet ordinary human with her head stuck gratefully in the sand. If she did not follow them in through the gates then they wouldn’t run after her either. She did not belong in their world; even Edward had known that in the end.

So she continued her studies, ignored the waves of grief and self-resentment that threatened to overwhelm when the whisper of Anthony rattled the wind chimes. She wandered through alleyways and textbooks, took photographs of buildings, and stood beneath the ringing clock tower.

Her mind was made up and it would take a world and a half to change it.


	2. Chapter 2

She wanted to believe it was chance that brought Alec to her table at a café, that perhaps the vampire in the skirt hadn’t said something about a pale American named Bella who had seemed a little too vehement in her refusal to join a certain tour, but by serendipity or design he entered her life one starless night beneath a street lamp.

Lowering her menu she’d caught sight of a young boy whose age she couldn’t quite determine. He glowed softly beneath the dim yellow lighting, his pale skin a reflection of moonlight on the dark river, his face at once chiseled and soft caught in a half-immortality as perpetual transition forever graced his features. He looked more inhuman than Edward ever had.

He caught her looking and looked away briefly making to walk on until he stopped and turned toward her again, a strange sort of determination on his features, and stiffly walked to the seat opposite hers and sat in it without a word.

It had been a while since she’d confronted a vampire about his lack of social abilities and with Edward it had been a little different because at the time she’d pointed things out she also hadn’t known he wasn’t human.

So here she was, at a table that had originally been for one, sitting across from what only looked like a fourteen year old but by the mulberry glint in his eyes was something that very much would like to make her his dinner instead of any pasta dish, and wondering what on earth she was supposed to say without letting him know that the jig was up.

Surprisingly there was little panic; she’d been terrified of vampires for so long in her life, she’d become an expert at it, and with repetition and so little death in the face of damnation imminent danger had somewhat lost its thrill. She’d discovered that with Jacob back in the days of motorcycles and cliff diving, she was forever an adrenaline junkie in withdrawal. Eating dinner with a vampire, it was almost like being at home. 

She’d never seen this particular vampire before, she could count the number of vampires she’d met on one hand anyway, but she knew that even if by some miraculous reason she’d forgotten one along the way it wouldn’t have been this one.

(She wondered if he was the one to pick Anthony’s bones out of his teeth.)

He seemed to be waiting for her to break the silence, picking at old-fashioned dark clothing that attempted so bravely to be casual, his eyes lifting to hers every few moments with a puzzled expression. For a truly surreal moment he was the shy and awkward fourteen year old boy he presented himself as.

“Sorry,” he said finally his voice ringing with an almost musical lilt, “I saw you eating by yourself and I thought…”

“Oh,” She responded and finally asked, “Are you lost?”

He blinked, perhaps wondering how that question could possibly apply to him, before nodding with a slightly rueful smile, “A little, I’m okay though. Do you mind, though?”

Bella had been indulging the whims of demons for years now.

“No, you can stay.” Bella said, “I already ordered though…”

(Of course he said that was fine, he already ate anyway.)

With a boyish smile that looked strange on that pale face he introduced himself as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

“I’m Alec.”

* * *

Alec was odd. She could say that with clear certainty. Edward had always had his moments, his manic tendencies, his depression, his bouts of passion but for the most part he had played the human well enough. Of course, Edward had been practicing for centuries, Alec from what she could gather was flying by the seat of his pants.

He acted too old and too young all at once. Sometimes his eyes would grow dark and she could see thousands of years spanning their depths but then whenever it looked as if she was going to break off the few strands holding them together he’d get this desperate look in his eyes and grab at her shirt sleeves (never her hand) and shake his head no. Don’t go, Bella.

(In those moments she’d see herself stranded in that forest so long ago, don’t go Edward, don’t go.)

Still, every time he showed up, outside her doorstep or in the court yard once the sun had safely set she couldn’t help but shudder and wonder if Anthony’s innards coated the inside of his intestines.

He told her about his beloved sister, Jane, a few years younger than him. Even though his lips had smiled his eyes had darkened at the mention of her and his fingers had clenched at the fabric of his pants, Jane wasn’t quite herself these days he said almost sadly. He said he lived in a rather large family, although he paused over the word family as if it wasn’t the word he should have chosen, they weren’t particularly close though. Only Jane, Jane was the only reason he stayed, but she didn’t stay for him.

Bella didn’t pry further than Alec was willing to divulge because no doubt these were secrets that would get her killed.

She told him about college, about art, about Charlie the cop, Renée the flighty housewife, and other inane tales of her life. Eventually, to her surprise, she told him the edited version of Forks.

* * *

I’m not sure I’d call it love, in retrospect. It was almost too religious for that, on both our ends, we built shrines to one another and fell in worship of the idols we’d made in our heads. He was quite the poet, for a seventeen year old you know. A regular Romeo, my John.

(Edward Cullen had to be replaced by a much less weighted name; there was a portrait of Carlisle with the ruling trio after all.)

It was more than his prettiness or his poetry; he was passionate about so many things. He breathed fire and life into everything he touched, every thought he had, there was no in between for him.

He said he loved me, that like a blazing sun I had torn my way across the universe and blinded him to all other stars of what could have been, and I said I loved him to. I think we liked to think of ourselves as a star-crossed love but one that would somehow work itself out in spite of everything. We were right and wrong about that, in the end. 

I think he realized I was only a high school girl after all and not whatever he had built in his head. It was a very anticlimactic finish, just him telling me in the woods that he’d gotten a little bored, and me knowing that this speech had always been coming.

A flame can only burn so brightly for so long, you know?

He stole every photograph I ever owned of him and tried to take the stereo out of my car and I haven’t seen him since.

* * *

Alec’s response.

“I’ve never been in love.”

* * *

She came to suspect that it’d be Alec who killed her one day soon. She was strangely happy about that. If she was going to die young she’d rather it be a friend than a truck in a parking lot, a serial killer vampire, Edward, or even Edward’s brother.

She didn’t tell him so, whenever he appeared on her doorstep, wondering what movie they’re going to watch next or what they’re going to go and see wandering beneath the street lamps but she managed a smile at the sight of slightly tousled dark hair.

* * *

He didn’t show up all the time. In the beginning he rarely showed up at all, appearing only one night a week at most before disappearing again. In the end when his visits came in steadier intervals she began to notice his more conspicuous absences. There were times when weeks would go by between consecutive visits.

Afterwards he’d return, looking dazed and haunted, shambling through her doorway without even a word in greeting and all she could say to him was, “You missed Christmas, Alec, we’ll have to do it late this year.”

Edward had always said that vampires didn’t feel fatigue that at most they felt a sort of crushing ennui, that they could go on and inspire themselves and others for all eternity, being damned and blessed by God all in the same moment. He was not witness to the pale boy resting beneath blankets on her couch, eyes finally closed, and a hand resting on his brow.

One time after these episodes he’d laughed, a bitter laugh that was cracked and jagged even in his unblemished tenor, “I have a… talent I guess you’d call it. My sister does too, it’s the only reason we’re really tolerated in our family, if it wasn’t for that I don’t know what would happen. She knows too but she… she doesn’t think about it like I do. Maybe she’s right, we have it, it won’t go away so why bother thinking about what ifs? I’m so tired, and I’m so very tired.”

She wondered what others thought about her, that weird girl who lived by herself, who once had a boyfriend named Anthony from some other college who every once in a while could be seen with a beautiful young boy who was far too young for any respectable adult. That was far from this room though, far from where her real life was, with the phantoms and the demons.

* * *

He never touched her, just as Edward had refused to back in Biology, and she supposed that was why it took him so long to notice.

She didn’t think it’d be the scar that would be her death warrant.

She’d always assumed it would be some slip of the tongue, some story about Edward, about Anthony even and she’d be finished. She’d always suspected he knew, deep down, that they were just playing a pleasant game of charades just as easily as they once played Poker.

In the shadows it looked like any other scar, she’d regaled him with tales of her clumsiness, he’d seen a bit of it in action himself when she’d stubbed her toe repeatedly on the doorway and almost fell down two flights of stairs.

It was an endless source of fascination for him, that and tales of ordinary high school glory. He’d stare at her in open mouthed awe as she told him about going to prom with a broken leg because she’d fallen down some stairs and out a window (she’d decided to lift Edward’s version for that one).

“I can’t picture it,” He said with a laugh, “I can’t see all these things in my head and I try so hard.”

Unfortunately the prom photos had been disposed of courtesy of Edward but there were other Bella accidents displayed for the world to see on film. He kept every one.

It was her bad luck then, one night, when he got a closer look at her hand and the crescent on the surface.

Only one beast leaves that kind of mark.

* * *

An epiphany.

Horrified silence.

A look of betrayal.

Ah, his eyes said even as he made for the door, ah…

And then the emptiness of an apartment and the scent of death on the horizon.

On her wall was a portrait of death sharpening his scythe.

* * *

She thought about leaving, packing her things and getting out, but something stopped her hands.

If it is to be anyone, anyone in the world, let it be someone I like for reasons I understand.

So she put away her suitcase and burned all the photographs she owned of herself with a lighter, It would be as if she never existed, Edward had once said.

She waited with legs crossed in a chair facing the door, her school things stowed away, she wouldn’t need them where she was going.

And when Alec came for her, opening the front door with the silence of a thief, she lifted her head and said in a calm voice, “His name was actually Edward.”

* * *

He held her hand, his fingers icy shackles, never once looking back at her and pulled her through the near empty streets towards the ominous clock tower and the building that waited beside it. She wished they could walk slower, not so much to extend things she was as doomed as they got, the number was really up now Bella, but so that she could see the city one last time. It was a very beautiful place at the end of things.

So here she was following after Anthony after all.

She should have told him that she’d come later, long after he’d entered that damned place she’d follow his trail and meet him at the exit.

It’d be good to see him again, maybe explain a few things on the other side.

Alec said nothing, not when the entered the too large halls that echoed, not when the passed the human secretary who looked at Bella with something akin to pity, horror, and shame all at once, and not when the doors opened to a chamber lit by electric lights embedded in crystals so that it seemed almost like sunlight.

Bella Swan’s death would be without fanfare or funeral.

* * *

An overdue explanation with the king of the false gods as well as a bargain.

“Now, Bella, was it? I’m just dying to know, how on earth did you manage to survive that?”

“I got lucky.”

“Well, that is some extraordinary luck then. Not so much now, of course, because without even opening your mouth we know that you know everyone’s dirty little secret.”

A pause.

“No? Nothing more than luck? Well, come here then Bella, that’s it you’ve been here before you know what good running does. That’s it. Now, Bella, you have two choices here not one like you’re assuming. One is the fate you expect, you die on this floor for knowing a little too much. The second is much more interesting, we make you a vampire, and you stay with us a little while and see how you like it. Of course I’ll only offer the second under a few conditions.”

A pause again, no response from the girl.

 “You see, Bella, normally one bite and that’s it. No one walks away from that, no one human at least, but somehow you did and I’m very curious to know why. Maybe it’s not so much lucky as it is special, eh Bella? You don’t even have to say it, just touch my hand and we’ll both know. It’s not like you have anything to lose.”

She reached forward, with a touch of hesitation, and touched the oddly frail looking skin.

* * *

In the end there wasn’t much of a choice because they didn’t ask her if she’d rather die instead.

She wasn’t sure if it was Alec who did the deed but it was him who was there by her bedside three days later once the fire had ravaged all that was left of her and left her as a house of glass too brittle to stand.

He didn’t say that he wished he hadn’t seen but she could read it in his eyes anyway.


	3. Chapter 3

The coven wasn’t so much a coven as it was two different covens loosely connected. One was the main coven, the three vampire men and their wives. It was Aro, the leader who knew every thought you’d ever had with only a touch, who’d decided she was a bauble worth having. Although, Alec confided later in the tour, he’d been set on having Bella the moment he’d seen the scar on a human’s flesh the thoughts had only made the deal a little sweeter.

Things were somewhat awkward between them now that all truths had been revealed that and Bella couldn’t quite come to terms with her new senses. Had lights always been so bright and the world filled with such color? Her throat ached, it was parched and cracking, but she knew that it wasn’t water she wanted.

She’d lost her clumsiness and gained it back in full force all at once as she was constantly distracted by her own whirling thoughts and the world around her.

She was given dark and rather expensive looking clothing that would make her look much too pale to be any true living thing. She held the cloak in her hands attempting not to look at her fingernails for the embedded crystals that had always been in Edward’s skin.

They stood in her new sparse quarters in silence, searching for something to say, and finally Alec turned on his heel and shut the door behind him as he left.

In the end she lived as she’d died, stumbling about in the dark and trying not to trip over her own two feet. 

* * *

Bella and Charlie had become closer in the latter years than Bella and Renée ever had been. With her mom it always seemed as if Bella was having to take care of things. It wasn’t as if she was an alcoholic or in any way neglectful, Bella had simply known that if bills were going to get paid, taxes going to get done, then it would be Bella reminding Renée that they had to get done.

Charlie was a calm presence and despite his small town leanings he had wisdom to pass on. Renée had been a whirlwind of activities and affection but she had never seemed to know what to do, Bella had never gone to her for advice.

It was Charlie who saved her life when she was drowning in despair, Charlie who swore if he ever saw Edward Cullen again he’d shoot him in the head murder be damned, and Charlie whose heart would now break when his daughter disappeared in Italy never to return.

Sitting alone in her room, thinking of her cellphone that would never call him again, she could see him a few days from now growing desperate as her existence became muddled and finally was questioned completely.

Charlie had said goodbye one week ago when they talked and he hadn’t even known it was the end.

Years ago though Bella had decided to say goodbye to people each time as if it was going to be the last time she ever saw them. Because somehow she had always known that when the time came she wouldn’t get the chance, no death beds for Bella Swan, only pickup trucks and vampires.

Still, she wished that he had known, at the very least.

Jacob would probably guess when given enough time, Bella never attracted the usual murderers, she wondered if he’d try to come after her. She hoped for his sake he didn’t, god knows what would happen if Volterra found out about the wolves.

Still, even though she’d known it was coming, had known for years it felt so empty. So terribly unresolved, like there was still more to come, not quite to the eye of the next storm yet and somewhere out there death still said her number was up.

* * *

Alec slowly but surely crawled his way back into her life. It was almost funny, how little he changed now that the metaphorical cat was long out of the bag. He was still that awkward not-fourteen year old who spoke a little too well and dressed in clothes that had clearly been picked out for him.

He’d find her in the hallway or out in the court yard and sit cross legged next to her and ask some question that didn’t need asking. Like if she missed the movie Blade Runner as much as he did, or if she had grown to like the color black.

The others avoided her for the most part, perhaps because they were avoiding Alec, but most likely because they hadn’t seen her coming and somehow Alec had. She’d gathered that normally gifted vampires like herself had to be sought out and coerced into joining, years of planning were dedicated to finding them, but she had just been found one day wandering about the city like it was no big deal.

If Alec hadn’t spotted her she’d have walked straight back out again without a scratch on her. That was more than a little alarming to everyone involved.

She had been isolated for most of her life, even before Edward had burst through like a comet, and she was used to long quiet hours spent by herself in dark rooms. It seemed longer without sleeping as if there was no true division between days anymore but it was still bearable. Still to have someone at least to wave to in the halls, it made a slight difference.

* * *

Sometimes she met with Aro.

She had expected that she wouldn’t see much of the heads of the family once she had been either murdered or turned. She had thought that ruling the vampire world they would have better things to do than babysit a fledgling. In some aspects she was correct but only in some.

Marcus was indifferent to everything on this plane of existence since his wife’s death. She thought that he lived now out of habit rather than any desire to accomplish a task or enjoy life. To him life was a meaningless blur where one was forever cast into the role of Sisyphus pushing that damned bolder up the hill. To him she was a flash of light in a room filled with tiny electric bulbs, one of thousands, only lit for a brief instant before fading into the background again.

Caius was a somewhat different story. Caius liked to believe he was ambitious and cunning but he had nothing to be cunning or ambitious about. He was the unsatisfied man who had long since conquered the world but had enjoyed more of the conquering than the actual ruling but hadn’t realized that fact yet. He liked to imagine that the people around him were intricate chess pieces in a game of strategy, ones that could be moved here and there by his will, each with balanced flaws and skills.

Edward had once said that he hated that he couldn’t read her thoughts.

Bella’s talent, her shielded mind, made her a formidable chess piece not in what she could do to others but in the fact that nothing could be done to her. She could not be coerced or otherwise manipulated on such a base level of the playing field and Caius found that unforgivable.

So in the end it was only Aro who showed interest just as it had been in the beginning.

It would usually be Heidi, beautiful red haired Heidi, dressed in dark clothing as she prepared to play the Pied Piper’s tune. She’d stand in Bella’s doorway and look at her with flat condemning eyes all the while telling her that Aro wished to see her now.

Then she’d be there, standing before that center throne, the dark haired god staring down at her his translucent skin crackling beneath the stress of movement.

I think therefore I am did not apply to Edward. Namely this was because his thoughts weren’t his own, of the images and words that roamed through his head very little actually belonged to him and him alone. Upon reflection this was probably the source of his fascination with her that ability to be himself for a few moments, without being isolated, to have interaction that wasn’t taking place only in his head.

Aro’s gift was much worse than Edward’s ever was. When Aro touched someone’s hand he became that person in every sense of the word. Every thought they’d ever had, everything they’d ever seen, in that physical contact it belonged to him.

He’d never met someone able to keep him out before, he found it fascinating.

He said there was endless potential in her that as a human she had been so formidable, as a vampire she might as well be a god, she just had to exert herself slightly and those shields would extend further than she ever imagined. Should she will it all these mind games vampires played so easily would become null the moment she walked in a room.

He delighted in the fact that it was only chance that brought her to him. That fateful friendship with Alec, and before that, her mysterious run in with the vampire. Sometimes he asked if he could trace the scar, if she would tell him how it happened, she gave him the edited version of Phoenix and he loved every second of it. Not that he believed it but it was all a game to Aro anyway.

No other being had made her feel so thoroughly uncomfortable with just a glance.

Perhaps what was the worst was that in his eyes she saw a reflection of Edward, because in the end, their words were not so very different.

If she could dream she wondered if their faces would merge into one.

* * *

The first time they took her into a room filled with corpses she wanted to vomit. As it stood she didn’t eat a single one surprising her peers, her masters, and her potential victims all in one.

Amidst the panic and the horrid screaming and clawing at the doors the desperate men and women had turned their eyes to her and in that split second realized she was the only one without blood dripping from her lips like cheap lipstick. They’d attempt to stumble towards her, their bodies registering what their brains hadn’t quite realized yet, they rarely made it all the way. And she just stood there, like some beautiful china doll, just waiting for her rainbow embedded skin to shatter and leave her broken on the marble floor.

When the room was filled with nothing but corpses and the porcelain demons made their way out of the room licking their fingers clean as they went Jane passed her and gave her a contemptuous glance, “Too good to eat, human lover?”

Not lover, she responded back to Jane in her head once safely alone in her quarters with the candlelight eating away at wax with a flickering intensity, it was nothing personal like love. There were individuals, bright stars in the abyss, but Bella had never been the most altruistic of people.

Their blood just tasted like rust.

* * *

Alec came by later, when she was staring at the ceiling contemplating the stain that had managed to crawl its way onto the stone work. He seemed old that night, the gawky fourteen year old face that he normally wore replaced by something far older, something tender.

“Edward Cullen in Forks, yes?”

She’d been wondering when he would ask, her newly forged garnet eyes drifted to his, not yet dark with bloodlust but waning in their intensity. He looked as tired as she felt,  Edward had preached the glories of vampiric insomnia, as he had done with most things he had overlooked the harsh realities of fatigue without release.

“Yes.”

He made his way to the bed, the useless bed put there as an afterthought on the part of her makers, almost like a bad pun, and sat on it folding his hands in front of him and looking blankly ahead. He didn’t ask if she had known that he was a vampire, if her run in with the vampire who scarred her hand was really Edward Cullen instead of some nameless leech, or if anything of Bella Swan was actually real at all. Alec never was one for pointless questions even if he was one for pointless charades.

Then again perhaps he didn’t want to know, confirming his answers would only lead to unwanted investigations into the Cullen’s business when Alec’s hand next met Aro’s, perhaps it was best to leave suspicions as suspicions, things were easier that way.

“Jane and I were turned after Carlisle Cullen had left Volterra, I’ve never seen him in person, but for a pacifist he left quite the impression. He also has a notoriously large and dangerously gifted coven, every time we turn our backs it seems they have a newer more lethal addition, that’s another story though. His coven, they don’t eat humans, do they?”

They called themselves vegetarians as they butchered mountain lions because given the context it was almost funny. It was the sort of humor that desperate people laughed at when the room had grown too stale for comfort; Edward had always loved that brand of humor.

“No, they don’t.”

“Do you want to go join them?” He asked hurriedly, his words stumbling over one another like small bumbling children, and his eyes so very desperate. The old man in him expected her to betray him as he betrayed her while the child clung to her hand and tried to assure himself that it could not be possible, Alec had never looked more himself.

She thought about them, the Cullens, her family. She could see them all smiling, as if caught in a picture frame, their hair almost glowing in the sunlight and their skin a fire of colors. They looked so happy even bitter Rose, even Edward, all staring back at her with crinkled golden eyes.

Once upon a time a prince met his princess in the woods and told her among the whispering oaks that she had only dreamed she was a princess when in truth she was little more than the rubble of a ruined castle. I’ve played this game before, he said with tired eyes, and I’m done with it now.

“No, there’s nothing for me there.”


	4. Chapter 4

Jane was a ticking time bomb and everyone knew it.

They never talked about it, but whenever their eyes would slide to her they would slide away again just as fast, as if gauging how many seconds were left on the clock before she went kaboom.

Bella and Heidi had once talked about it. Bella didn’t have too many friends in her new home, Alec still seemed like the only candidate who fit that bill, but as the months wore on and Bella remained Bella a few others inched closer. Heidi was one of them, she said Bella still had this human air about her even as a vampire, a lack of grace and conviction that always gave her interesting opinions. Heidi found Bella vaguely interesting and Bella said roughly the same thing about her, when Bella told her that she was the Pied Piper Heidi had thought it was hilarious.

They were sitting in the garden, staring into the shadowed corridors that surrounded the court yard, having just watched Alec and Jane walk past with a look of purpose that could only mean they were heading to speak to Aro.

“You don’t turn children into vampires.”  Heidi started bluntly causing Bella to turn her head and see Heidi’s dark narrowed eyes, “There are reasons our laws exist, they are like our commandments really, if God appeared before the vampires and gave him a covenant the Volterra laws would be the ones written in the stones.”

Thou shalt not draw needless attention of sentient beings, Bella thought to herself, thou shalt not turn human children into bloodsucking demons.

“Aro created Jane and Alec, didn’t he?”

Heidi frowned but nodded, “Yes, he did, because they were too good to pass up. Someone had picked them up off the gutters in England, could practically smell the talent on them, and they’ve been here ever since. He did wait a few months, thinking that he could wait a few years until the boy was a man and the girl a young woman but their blood drenched our halls and we grew terribly impatient because of it. So now we have our witch twins.”

She remembered the look in Aro’s eye when he met her, if she had been five years younger, a girl as young or younger than Alec, how long would he have waited before he broke his own laws?

It was never presumed that these conversations were about Alec, he was occasionally lumped in as the witch twin, as the more powerful of the siblings, but never as the most destructive. His sister was positively blinding, like the comet Edward claimed Bella had been in his life she hurtled across the sky, only appearing for a few desperate moments before she burned herself out.

She hated Bella, she hated everything, she hated the world, and she hated herself. She pretended that she didn’t, that she worshipped her masters and lived for their praises, she pretended to be a good girl but it was in her eyes. Jane didn’t believe in anything anymore.

They used her and she knew it, they sent her to the battlefield to inflict terror and pain upon their enemies and she would not hesitate to do so, if there were such a thing as damnation in life then Jane had taken it and drunk it whole.

* * *

It was an unspoken expectation that one day Bella would be taken to the field or else given the duty of guarding the coven along with Renata. At first it had seemed as if she would be kept close and under the eye of Aro but there were occasional power struggles between the three and Caius was more than willing to argue his piece that Bella must prove her prowess in battle before being given such an important role as guarding the coven.

What he really meant was, why don’t we see if we can kill her first before we resign ourselves to her presence?

Bella was trained for a year, taught how to overcome her stumbling feet and to punch back when someone slapped you in the face. Alec would sit on the sidelines watching her with worried, tired eyes, as she traded blows with men who towered above her and sent her flying into walls.

Vampirism had not turned her into a fighter.

Edward had once said that vampirism highlighted certain traits you’d had, froze them in time, his uncanny ability to hear thoughts, Rose’s pigheadedness, and she found that she agreed with this to a further extent. Vampirism made you more yourself than you ever were before.

“Christ,” They’d say looking at her with a sneer as she stumbled to her feet, “It’s almost like you’re still human.”

But she did get to her feet after every beating, even when she stumbled she got back up, because that was what the human Bella had always done. She fell, certainly, but she climbed and scraped and hauled herself back up to her feet even if it meant falling again. In that way Bella wasn’t a warrior but she was a survivor and that was worth ten fighters at the end of the day because she’d already been to hell and knew the steps back out by heart. Even by looking at them she knew that these people had never been where she had been, no matter how long they had lived, they didn’t have that flat expression in their eyes.

After these sessions ended, where they told Bella she was a waste of everyone’s time, Alec would reach out a hand and help her to her feet allowing her to lean on him as they went back to her room. Vampires did feel fatigue, she’d think every time, they felt it all the time.

She improved, slightly, but only slightly there was no doubt that if she came across someone moderately fast and aware of themselves that Bella really would meet the angel of death. No more close calls with pick-up trucks and vampires, that’d be the real end. However, after a year it was time to start pulling her weight, and it seemed there was no arguing when three gods were set against you.

* * *

Alec’s warning on the way to France where a few fledglings ran rampant in a part of the world that did not taste of death.

This will not be pleasant, it will not be remotely pleasant, but you must stand there and persist regardless of what happens. Look at them but don’t look, think about your task and about something that makes you happy, but don’t think about them and how easily they could be you.

Stand next to me, the others will not look out for you if they try to fight back, and I will do what I can. Watch our backs and keep them from getting inside our heads as easily as we get inside theirs.

When it’s over and we come back don’t think about it or talk about it, that moment no longer exists, they are only funeral pyres now.

Do you understand?

* * *

She had always thought that the deaths of vampires were less horrific than their human counterparts, perhaps it had been because she was human at the time, so seeing distantly as James was torn apart and lit on fire was almost a relief as to the massacre it would have been had he been human.

The burning of flesh smelled rotten no matter what manner of being it was.

She didn’t remember much of it, only dull moments here or there, she’d taken Alec’s advice and stood beside him. Stretching her shield further than ever before to keep all of them, not just him, in it and she’d watched as with one single glance he crippled them. She could see the light go out of their eyes, a few stumbled about blindly, screaming as if trying to feel or hear some sensation but knowing it was the end.

If Jane was a bomb then Alec was simply death.

Looking at him as he stared out at them he seemed almost as dead and doomed as they were, it was written on his face, lie back and think of something happy and clearly he was in the process of being elsewhere yet on the battlefield in the same instant.

It was hardly even a battle, no it was closer to slaughtering cattle, really. She was summoned with the others away from Alec to begin cutting up the flailing vampires who were striking out at anything and everything hoping that the air in front of their face was at least one of their enemies. So they cut their enemies up and even though vampires did not regurgitate Bella felt the bile in her throat as she hacked off heads and limbs and handed them to her waiting superiors.

She hadn’t even been told what these people had done, just that they deserved to die, and she desperately tried to think of them as lifeless dolls who were nothing that could think or be. She tried not to see her face superimposed on their image.

She never did manage to succeed at that sort of thing.

True to his word Alec didn’t speak of it later, rather instead he wore that exhausted look that he used to enter her apartment with, the one that spoke of burning corpses and his own use as if he were a particularly convenient tool.

When they’d reached Volterra they’d simply sat in Bella’s room and stared at walls as if nothing had happened in the first place.

(The only indication Alec gave to what had occurred was when his eyes turned to Bella’s and he said in a distant tone, “I hated the Terminator.”)

* * *

Bella on missions became a more or less regular occurrence, often times without Alec. Alec and Jane were convenient to use, but they were not always necessary, and Aro liked his prized possessions to be where he could see them. Only when it was reported to be a true problem, an army of newborns, or a particularly strong coven, were either Jane or Alec dispatched if not the pair of them.

Bella, being in her trial period, was sent out almost every time.

Caius, she thought distantly, must really want her dead for whatever reason she couldn’t fathom.

Fairly quickly Bella would find herself alone in these battles, told to mentally guard the troops, and decapitate the angry fledgling running at her at the same time. Given her fighting abilities it was perhaps expected that she wouldn’t last in too many of these situations but Bella had luck on her side as she always did and proved remarkably hard to kill.

She’d taken to carrying cans of aerosol and a lighter, bought in hardware stores along the way to whatever corner of the globe they were headed to, and so far she had made great use of them. Strange, she had never really believed in Hell and yet here she was in a world of burning corpses.

It was true, she found, that human memories faded because it became harder and harder to picture Edward’s face when all she could see were these wretched screaming things on fire. It was hard to remember a lot of things like that.

It really was only a matter of time before she broke.

* * *

“I can’t stay here.” Her room was empty, no one was listening, but the walls heard and the words echoed amongst them like a foul rumor, “If I stay here I will drown.”

**Author's Note:**

> Yet another thing that hasn't been worked on in sometime but deserves to be moved over.
> 
> Thanks ror reading, comments, kudos, and bookmarks are appreciated.


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